Palmetto Trust to restore Daufuskie home in new program honoring native ownership

Michael Bedenbaugh/ For Bluffton Today The Frances Jones house sits back from Daufuskie Island's School Road, just north of the Mary Fields School. The home of the late education leader will be restored under an agreement with the Palmetto Trust for Historic Preservation that maintains native ownership.

A South Carolina historic preservation organization believes it’s found a way to rehabilitate significant Gullah structures on Daufuskie Island that assauges concerns among natives about holding onto the land they treasure.

The Palmetto Trust for Historic Preservation hopes to begin work rehabilitating the home of educational leader Frances Jones this summer under a leasing agreement with current owners that will recoup costs through heritage tourism while providing money for continued maintenance and future income, said Michael Bedenbaugh, executive director. “There is some concern among a lot of the islanders that they want to hold onto their land and not lose it, and we knew that the best way to save these properties was to work out a model where the owner would not have to sell for us to invest the money into it,” he said.

Once numbering about 2000, the Gullah population — descendants of slaves — has shrunk to between 10 and 20 with the decimation of the oyster industry and other vanishing economic opportunities.

The Frances Jones cottage, home to the longtime teacher and principal at the Mary Fields School, sits just north of the two-room school house built in the 1930s for Daufuskie’s black children. Forensics show at least a one-room portion was constructed in the mid-19th century, with additions in the 1890s and 1920s, Bedenbaugh said, adding the home has been hard hit by termites and vandalism.

Jones, who died in 2002 at the age of 92, taught for some 40 years at the school, championed equal access to education and started Daufuskie Day in 1976 to maintain ties among the Gullah community.

Renovations should likely fit into a budget of $100,000, and the restored property — with elements of historical significance — could be used as a vacation rental or for other tourism purposes, Bedenbaugh said.

“We want to partner with anybody who wants to help to ensure that story is told accurately and respectfully,” he said.

When the Palmetto Trust first started piecing together the Daufuskie Endangered Places program with a $150,000 grant, it recognized its traditional method of buying property, restoring it and selling it with restrictions to pay for the costs would have to be tweaked, Bedenbaugh said.

“Usually in areas like Daufuskie, the traditional owners of the property — the African Americans descended from freedmen — were usually pushed out by higher property taxes or big-money development, so this is a way we tried to create to keep that from happening,” he said.

Leon Love, chairman of the the S.C. African American Heritage Commission, said he’s never seen a similar program in the state, and he’s hopeful it will allow Daufuskie to avoid the pattern of development-to-African-American-exclusion seen on other barrier islands, but he acknowledges lingering suspicion among natives.

“You need to educate the participants so they can understand what they’re getting into, because, quite frankly, when people see Hilton Head and how it’s been developed and black ownership reduced, people go, ‘Here they go again,’ but this preserves ownership while at the same time going from a liability to an income-producing property,” he said. “That’s a win-win.” Ervin Simmons, president of the Daufuskie Island Foundation and a former student of Jones, said he favors avoiding legal entanglements with outside groups to preserve property but said he’ll support future Palmetto Trust initiatives as long as there’s certainty natives will keep their land.

“The critical question, as always, from me, is what are the risks associated with (lease agreements)?”

Beyond that, Simmons said he wants to see the restoration and future site design stay true to the life of Jones, who also served as a “master social worker” helping natives keep their land, pay taxes and handle legal documents.

“I think the real delicate piece is we have to be careful that Ms. Frances is set up properly in the context of the value she was to African Americans,” he said. “She was hugely valuable in the struggle for quality education at a time when education was so denied.”